The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [196]
12. Richard J. McNally, Natasha B. Lasko, Susan A. Clancy, Michael L. Macklin, Roger K. Pitman, and Scott P. Orr, “Psychophysiological Responding During Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens,” Psychological Science 15, no. 7 (2004): 493–97.
13. Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
14. Susan A. Clancy, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 154.
15. Ibid., 150. See also Gregory L. Reece, UFO Religion: Inside Flying Saucer Cults and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2007).
16. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2_1DofIVqg.
17. For a highly readable and very entertaining account of people who search for aliens, from goofball fringers to hardcore scientists, see Joel Achenbach, Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).
18. The best single-volume summary covering all aspects of the question in a highly readable and yet scholarly treatment is Michael A. G. Michaud, Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials (New York: Copernicus Books, 2007).
19. Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life (New York: Copernicus Books, 2002).
20. You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKAXrmkx12g.
21. Personal correspondence, August 19, 2009.
22. This progressivist bias, in fact, is pervasive in nearly all evolutionary accounts and is directly challenged by counterfactual thinking. I once explained to my young daughter that polar bears are a good example of a transitional species between land and marine mammals, since they are well adapted for both land and marine environments. But this is not correct. Polar bears are not “becoming” marine mammals. They are not “transitioning” to anything. They are perfectly well adapted for doing just what they do. They may become marine mammals should, say, global warming melt the polar ice caps. Then again, they may just go extinct. In either case, there is no long-term drive for polar bears to progress to anything, since evolution creates immediate adaptations only for local environments. The same applies to our hominid ancestors.
23. Richard G. Klein, The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 367–493.
24. Richard Leakey, The Origin of Humankind (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 134.
25. Klein, Human Career, 441–42.
26. Christopher Wills, Children of Prometheus (Reading, Mass.: Perseus Books, 1998), 143–45.
27. Shermer, How We Believe.
28. Klein, Human Career, 469.
29. Ian Tattersall, “Once We Were Not Alone,” Scientific American, January 2000, 56–62.
30. Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think About Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 212.
31. Leakey, Origin of Humankind, 132.
32. Ibid., 138.
33. Ibid., 20.
34. Tattersall, Fossil Trail, 246.
35. George Basalla, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 10–12.
36. Michael Shermer, The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
37. David Swift, SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk About Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 57.
38. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delacorte, 1992), 160.
39. David Brin, “Shouting at the Cosmos … Or How SETI Has Taken a Worrisome Turn into Dangerous Territory,” 2006, http://www.davidbrin.com/.
40. Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming” (speech at the California Institute of Technology, January 17, 2003), http://www.crichton-official.com/.